YouTube now lets you blur out anything in a video

Google today announced the launch of a smart feature people can use once they’ve uploaded videos to YouTube. Now you can draw a box around the thing you want to blur in a video, and YouTube will automatically keep that thing from being seen clearly, even as it moves elsewhere in the frame.

With this new Custom Blurring feature, you can adjust the size of the box, move it, and adjust the start and stop time. A Lock button keeps the blurred box in the same place on the screen. You can save the changes to your video or create a separate one that reflects your changes.

“While the use cases for this tool are vast, we built this feature with visual anonymity in mind,” YouTube privacy lead Amanda Conway wrote in a blog post. “We wanted to give you a simple way to blur things like people, contact information or financial data without having to remove and re-upload your content.”

Custom Blurring builds on the introduction of face-blurring capability in YouTube in 2012. But this is far more granular.

YouTube has more than 1 billion active users, and Google frequently adds or finesses features to the service, including some intended just for creators. For instance, Google recently improved the system that recommends frames that people can use as thumbnails for videos they upload. Google also recently launched a translation marketplace for creators.

You can find Custom Blurring in the Blurring Effects tab of the Enhancements tool in YouTube.